White House officials promised that President Obama’s final State of the Union address wouldn’t be a traditional State of the Union address. It wouldn’t dwell on the past; it would look to the future. It wouldn’t be about celebrating the last seven years; it would be about preparing for the next seven decades. It wouldn’t be a report on progress made; it would be a road map for progress still to come.

To put it mildly, those promises were not entirely kept.

Obama did deploy plenty of rhetoric about the distant future. But he did just as much traditional boasting about work already done, from cutting unemployment in half to cutting the deficit by three fourths, from resuscitating the auto industry to expanding health insurance, from stopping Ebola to killing Osama bin Laden. Maybe it wasn’t exactly a traditional progress report, but when the White House posted it on Medium, it included charts detailing “The Progress We’ve Made on the Economy,” “The Progress We’ve Made on Climate Change,” and “The Progress U.S. Leadership Has Made in the World.” Maybe it wasn’t exactly a traditional State of the Union, but it did conclude with the familiar words: “The state of the union is strong.”

As a yes-we-can candidate running on post-partisan dreams, Obama was often dismissed as a talented speechifier who had never gotten anything done. But as a grind-it-out president in a hyper-partisan age, he’s turned out to be more effective at doing than talking. He has not brought Americans together with his bully pulpit — his aides say he particularly dislikes the annual State of the Union charade — and he has failed to end the pettiness and bitterness of Washington. But he has produced dramatic and often underappreciated change in the policy arena, and last night, he smuggled plenty of backward-looking triumphalism into his ostensibly forward-looking speech.

He pushed back hard against the doom and gloom that has dominated the Republican presidential debates.

He’s still clearly reluctant to dance too exuberantly in the end zone at a time when few Americans share his rosy view of the nation’s progress, when even his would-be Democratic successors are leery of excessive celebration. But if his main plot was about harnessing the spirit of America to win the future, his spike-the-football subplot was about how that’s already happening. “It’s how we recovered from the worst economic crisis in generations,” Obama said. “It’s how we reformed our health care system and reinvented our energy sector; how we delivered more care and benefits to our troops and veterans, and how we secured the freedom in every state to marry the person we love.”

If the president didn’t quite declare that everything is awesome, he pushed back hard against the doom and gloom that has dominated the Republican presidential debates. “Let me start with the economy, and a basic fact: The United States of America, right now, has the strongest, most durable economy in the world,” he proclaimed. He cited the longest streak of private-sector job creation in history, the auto industry’s best year ever, 14 million new jobs. “Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction,” he said.

While waxing lyrical about future goals, he kept finding excuses to mention past successes. On education, he hailed record high school graduation rates, the recent bipartisan fix of No Child Left Behind, and dramatic student loan relief. On health care, he bragged that the Affordable Care Act has extended coverage to nearly 18 million uninsured Americans while slowing medical cost inflation. He reminded Americans that his administration enacted rules designed to protect the openness of the Internet, brought most public schools online, made unprecedented investments in clean energy through the 2009 stimulus bill, reduced foreign oil imports by nearly 60 percent, and reduced carbon emissions more than any other nation. “Gas under two bucks a gallon ain’t bad, either,” he added with a bit of a smirk.

Obama pushed back just as hard against the notion that America has forfeited its global leadership. “I told you earlier all the talk of America’s economic decline is political hot air,” he said. “Well, so is all the rhetoric you hear about our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker. The United States of America is the most powerful nation on earth. Period. It’s not even close. It’s not even close.”

As he did with the economy, Obama focused on what his administration has been doing already to fight ISIL and disrupt its terror plots. “With nearly 10,000 air strikes, we are taking out their leadership, their oil, their training camps, and their weapons,” he said. He responded to the chest-beating GOP debates with some macho talk of his own. “If you doubt America’s commitment — or mine — to see that justice is done, ask Osama bin Laden,” he said. “Ask the leader of al Qaeda in Yemen, who was taken out last year, or the perpetrator of the Benghazi attacks, who sits in a prison cell.” If the message was about the future, it was that he intends to keep doing what he’s been doing for seven years, continuing a “patient and disciplined strategy” of multilateral engagement. That strategy, he argued, has rolled back Iran’s nuclear program, stopped Ebola in West Africa, restored diplomatic relations with Cuba, negotiated a historic trade deal in Asia, helped Colombia resolve a decades-long war, and led the way for the most ambitious global climate deal in history.

Only a quarter of U.S. citizens believe the country is heading in the right direction.

For all the White House promises to avoid laundry lists, well, that’s a pretty big load. And while the domestic and foreign policy change Obama touted last night is real, Americans do not seem to be embracing it. Only a quarter of them believe the country is heading in the right direction. The Congress that Obama addressed last night, unlike the Congress he addressed in 2009, is dominated by Republicans.

Last night, Obama made a final case to the country, and to the historians of the future, that the changes of the last seven years have set the nation on a better trajectory. There were a few traditional State of the Union agenda items, calls for personalized medicine and immigration reform and a new war on cancer. But for the most part, he suggested that the path forward is the path we’re already on. “We’ve made progress,” he declared. “But we need to make more.”